And on a personal note, betaworks is awesome. I’ve never been in a better, more enjoyable, more energizing, more functional professional environment. Excellent people, A+ talent, a culture that valorizes building and risk-taking, and a unifying mission to reinvent media.

Now comes the Dramatic Twist: I’m leaving betaworks.

Wut? you may be wondering. What, in light of that shameless set-up, could possibly drag me away from a dream job at betaworks?

As of this week, I’ve joined Medium, where I’ll be leading its content organization, developing new business opportunities, and growing Medium’s NYC presence.

In a sense, it’s a move within the family — betaworks is an investor in Medium, and Ev Williams is an investor in betaworks. But more importantly,John Borthwick and my other betaworks partners gave the move their blessing because they recognized that Medium is an incredible match for me, my interests, and my ambitions, as well as the operating muscles I’ve been working to build over the past few years.

I couldn’t be more excited to be a part of Medium. I’ve been an active Medium user since it first launched and have become increasingly fascinated/obsessed with it. Medium’s become the Internet’s best place for great writing and thoughtful conversation.It’s growing fast, scaling quickly, adding new capabilities briskly, and attracting an unmatched network of creators, thinkers, publishers, and the people who love them.And Medium is committed to things I care about, like freedom of expression, an open Internet, meaningful discourse, and excellence in product and infrastructure.I’ve known Ev Williams since we first worked together at Google, and have long thought it’d be fun to do something more directly with him. As I’ve gotten to know the Medium team, I’ve been hugely impressed with the level and diversity of talent, the sense of common purpose, and the bright culture of the company.

When I first arrived in 2012, betaworks’s website described the organization as “A New Medium Company,” which struck me as both clever and accurate. And it harmonizes well with the full legal name of my new home: A Medium Corporation.

So I made an appearance on NPR's Morning Edition today, talking about YouTube, Egypt, free speech, divergent national and religious sensitivities, and the danger of the heckler's veto. (BTW, I can now report that NRP's Steve Henn either is or works with a Miracle Editor capable of snipping longwinded sentences into a semblance of pithiness).

Here's the keynote talk I did at the Portland Digital eXperience (PDX) event, in which I talk about the North African revolutions, the onslaught of Syria's pro-Assad hacker army, the new dynamics created by China's Weibo platforms, and the success of the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement in the United States, what ties those things together, how they reveal much about the world we are now actively building, and what all that counsels for policymakers and entrepreneurs alike. Thanks to Mark Zusman and Rick Turoczy for the invite and the warm Portland hospitality, and to the Rich Report for recording & posting the video!

Best fringe benefit of the excursion, besides hanging out with my awesome sister Meg, was seeing Beirut play "Santa Fe" as the sun set over Portland.

A very exciting bit of personal news: I've joined betaworks as entrepreneur-in-residence. Led by the incredibly gifted John Borthwick, betaworks is forging a new, ambitious, wildly interesting model for creating and scaling innovative tech companies. It's become a real center of gravity for the start-up scene in New York, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

In which Jacob and I discuss Tumblr vs. Pinterest, Facebook vs. privacy, the case for baseline rules to protect consumer Internet privacy in the US, the horrible implications of the French push to create a "right to be forgotten", and why it would nevertheless be a catastrophe if the Internet comes to serve as an inescapable Permanent Record.

In which Jacob and I talk about Google's (and my) experience in China, why foreign tech companies will almost certainly fail there, and why China's government is slowly losing its grip over information.

Here's the first part of a recent conversation with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg. This bit is on Tumblr’s founder, the ethos and juju of the platform he created, and how Tumblr’s approach to identity translates into positivity, creativity, and anti-trollery.

Librarians + technology = a personal nirvana. There is no more awesome set of people doing more important work than the librarians and their nerd allies at the bleeding edge of library tech -- they are engaged in an underappreciated struggle to work out how mankind is going to preserve, extend, share, and democratize the sum of human knowledge in our increasingly digital age. So I was really psyched to go a do a talk at the 2012 Library Technology Conference about the technological forces driving the great policy issues of our age, along with an argument about why and where the library community should be engaged. Bonus for me: The event was at Macalester College, where I spent my high school summers taking Russian while trying to look like something other than the huge dork I was.

Here's my keynote, "Fight for the Future: Libraries, Tech Policy, and the Fate of Human Knowledge."

Here's a lunchtime talk I did at betaworks on my experience working in the White House, why it was awesome, why it was, um, frustrating, why it's hard to achieve large-scale change in the U.S. federal bureaucracy, and more.

The Ford Foundation has posted the video of a panel I recently joined on "[t]he possibilities and pitfalls of technology in the pursuit of human freedom." The other panelists were (the legendary and eloquent) Sir Tim Berners-Lee, (the brilliant and soon-to-be-book-launching) Rebecca MacKinnon, (the worldly and effective) Elisa Massimino, and (the multi-disciplinary and polymathical) Danny O’Brien. The moderator was (the charming and prolific) Sewell Chan, deputy editor for The New York Times. For me, the most interesting part of the panel was an exchange primarily with Elisa about the pressing need for mainstream/mainline human rights advocates and organizations to view seemingly-specialized tech issues like net neutrality, competition policy, intermediary liability, encryption policy, and user data control as core human rights issues.

This morning, I did an interview on the public radio show Marketplace on the techniques, effects, and implications of the Egyptian government's decision to shut down the Internet and mobile phone networks. As the write-up of the segment says:

In the wake of massive protests in Egypt, other countries have been paying attention and sometimes covering things up. The government of China is suppressing mentions of the uprising. Iran is blocking access to news sites, perhaps fearing renewed protests in their country.

On today's show, we look at the precedent set by Egypt's decision to block most Internet and cell phone access in that country. Jonathan Zittrain joins us. He's co-founder and co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a frequent guest on our show. Jonathan says that while Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have means to filter the Internet, Egypt's online system has always been pretty open so when they wanted to block it, they had to go all the way.

Andrew McLaughlin also joins us. He's a former director of global public policy at Google and former deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. He says while it was incredibly difficult to get online within Egypt's borders, neighboring countries had no issues at all, even though in many cases, their traffic goes through Egyptian territory.

Andrew tells us that Egypt has worked hard to position itself as a trustworthy hub for underwater cable that goes through the Red Sea, connecting to nearby countries. That service has not been disrupted.

As for what this means for other countries facing similar protests, we just don't know yet since Egypt's actions were unprecedented. But as protests begin to gather in other countries (and keep in mind that Egypt's protests were fueled by the overthrow in Tunisia), it's likely more governments will need to decide what to do about the Internet.